


At Your Next Convenience

by thegoodthebadandthenerdy



Series: And Other Salutations [1]
Category: The West Wing
Genre: (thts donna/joey), (thts josh/sam), Bisexual Joey Lucas, Bisexual Josh Lyman, Established Relationship, F/F, Falling In Love, First Dates, Gen, Lesbian Donna Moss, Living Together, M/M, Season/Series 02, Secret Relationship, bisexual sam seaborn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-19 07:31:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22674124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodthebadandthenerdy/pseuds/thegoodthebadandthenerdy
Summary: Donna has a date with Joey Lucas. Probably. Hopefully. She's gonna float the idea past Josh, take the temperature of the water, see where it goes from there.-Josh has, all things considered, no care in this world for if Donna dates Joey Lucas. Unless it comes back around to bite him on the ass, then he's got some care for it.
Relationships: Joey Lucas/Donna Moss, Josh Lyman & Donna Moss, Josh Lyman/Sam Seaborn
Series: And Other Salutations [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1631137
Comments: 5
Kudos: 62





	At Your Next Convenience

**Author's Note:**

> im watching the show for the first time and this idea came to me in the form of just wanting to write some donna/joey but tht somehow became a 4 part series thts also abt like. coming out and friendship and love. wild!
> 
> all timeline work is incredibly tentative but for the hell of it (and referenced events) we'll say this is around s2

THE OFFICE

THURSDAY AFTERNOON

Donna takes one quick breath before she pushes back from her desk and heads into Josh’s office, a file in hand so it doesn’t look like she’s about to do what she’s absolutely about to do. If asked, she’s prepared an admittedly flimsy story about needing a signature. Everyone around here needs a signature.

She doesn’t bother to knock, keeping up with her usual, just cuts straight through. Grabbing hold of the doorknob, she promptly announces, “I have a date,” and clicks the door shut. She tucks her back against it, eyes almost screwing shut as she silently cringes at the cadence of her voice and lets her lips twist tightly in melodrama. “Or,” she amends, eyes bounding open again, “I _could_ have a date, and I need you to not be mad and say you’re okay with it because I would really like to go on this date.” Better.

Josh has his chin dug into his hand, which she knows means she’s got a fifty-fifty shot of him hearing the next words that come out of her mouth. Her chances raise to sixty-five when he casts his eyes up, but they still flick back down to trail the end of his sentence on the papers in front of him.

Once he registers the look on her face, though, he blows a sigh between his teeth and scoots his papers back. He’s been trying to get through them for the better part of an hour, another five minutes for Donna’s latest isn’t exactly going to break him.

“Well, Donna, despite the fact that I’ve been trying for years, I can’t actually tell you what to do.”

She groans, all morose, and drops into the chair opposite him. Her diversion file—filled with printouts about the traditional cuisine from the region of a guest that had come to the White House about two months prior—smacks the floor beside her.

“Josh, I’m serious. If you tell me it’s crossing a boundary, if you tell me it’s inappropriate, if you tell me not to, Josh, I won’t. But I’d like to add that it’ll really, really suck, and then I’ll have so much free time to read this weekend that I won’t have any choice but to tell you all about it on Monday. I have two books out from the library on the history of hatpins, Josh. Two.” She holds up the appropriate amount in careful fingers for emphasis.

“As fascinating as this is, I have an actual job, which requires real things of me. Can we…I don’t know, not talk in code?” He splays his hands over his desk and pushes his shoulders back like that’s ever made her take him seriously.

“Josh—”

“Donna?” he asks with an impatient flick of his head.

“It’s Joey,” she says, casually folding her hands in her lap and digging one thumb nail between the lines on the knuckle of the other until it grounds her.

It’s actually funny, she can see him making the list in his head. His lips tighten, just a fraction, and his eyes scan the ceiling like the answer’ll be written in the seams. Donna looks up too, so as not to be left out.

“Joey who?” he finally asks, his voice doing that thing, the kind of strained, kind of uptick at the end _thing_. There are only so many women named Joey, he thinks, that Donna would feel the need to clear her date with past him.

“Joey Lucas, Josh. I have—”

“Could have.”

“I _could_ have a date with Joey Lucas.” She finally manages to catch her eyes on his and things are actually looking more promising than she’d thought they would. “And I would really like to and you haven’t done anything nice for me lately, so I was thinking you could just say yes and we’ll be even for you missing my birthday this year.”

“I miss your birthday every year!”

“I know and it’ll be marginally less insulting if you say yes.”

“Sorry, when did you two even meet?” Not that he knows all of Donna’s comings and goings, nor would he want to, but he thinks that this would’ve made its way to him before _now_.

“Well,” Donna starts, tipping her head to the right momentarily. “I was the one who let her into your office the first time she was here, but if you’re asking when we got close—when she’s here her desk isn’t that far from mine and she’s really very compelling, Josh.”

“I need to give you more work. And what does _compelling_ mean?”

“Webster’s defines compelling as—”

“Donna.”

“Compelling! I mean she’s compelling, Josh,” she says exasperatedly, one hand coming up the side of her neck and shifting until the heel of her hand is situated over her mouth. “But I wouldn’t say there aren’t any other adjectives,” she adds, mumbling it into her love line.

“So let me get this straight. You and Joey Lucas had a few, what, _rendezvous_ here at work, but you need—”

“Would like.”

“You would like my blessing to see her recreationally.”

“Yes." She adjusts her shoulders because that actually makes him take her seriously.

“Okay, not to turn us in another circle here because I’m already dizzy, but _why_? Not why her, because that’s, I mean, we’ve already touched on compelling, but why—”

“You?”

“Yes!”

“Because!” she finally breaks, her back jerking straight. “I value your friendship and wouldn’t want to undermine that just for some date that I--let me be clear, very much want to go on. I know she, in some way, broke your heart; I mean, you should’ve seen yourself after the Al Kiefer debacle, I almost felt sympathetic for you, it was a very distressing time for me.”

“She did not—Joey Lucas did not break my _heart_. I mean maybe she bruised my ego, but break my heart? Don’t you think that’s pushing it?”

Donna flicks her eyes, dryly comments, “You’re showing real character development in acknowledging that you have an ego, but that doesn’t change that you brooded for half an hour after you knocked on her hotel door,”

“I was not brooding.”

“Then what were you doing, Josh?”

“I was,” he starts, tangling his hand in the back of his hair, shrugging his shoulders slightly. “I was walking.”

“Brusquely?”

“Thoughtfully.”

“You were brooding,” she rules. She should have a gavel.

“And anyway,” he pushes forward, rocking to put his elbows on his desk. Kinetic energy, thy name is Josh Lyman. “That’s the past. And it was just a, it was like a crush. A little thing. Didn’t even really register on my radar.”

“But it’s not going to come _back_ on your radar.” That should’ve been a question, she realizes with a flush, but it’s already out there now. No take-backsies is the legal term, right?

Not that he notices. Without thinking better of it, he shoots back, “Donna, I’ve kinda got other things on my radar right now,” his hands cutting through the air, mouth catering toward pliable exasperation.

She leans forward conspiratorially, small smile touching the rim of her lips like liner. “Like what?” she asks, one tribune momentarily forgotten in favor of another.

He blusters. “None of your business.” Then, because he already goes against better judgment, doesn’t matter whose, he clarifies while distractedly flicking papers around, “But it takes up all of my, y’know, radar and it will for the foreseeable future, as much of it as possible. So please court Joey Lucas to your heart’s content, I really don’t care.”

She perks up instantly. “Really?”

“Yeah.” He softens slightly, shoulders not so bunched. “Just, y’know, be careful.” He flicks his wrist to indicate everything he knows she already knows but that he has to remind her of for his own peace of mind. Those words have been hunting him long as life, Donna too, but he can’t send her off with a blessing and not a word of warning, not after the Cahill incident. He’d come deadly close to something like empathy then, and he doesn’t think either of them will be able to look each other in the eye if it continues.

But Joey—nah, he trusts Joey Lucas.

Donna gives him a smile, teeth carefully tucked away, but mouth no less strained. “Thank you,” she says and the sincerity of it meets their yearly quota, so she swerves them back into the swing of things. “So, you’re seeing someone?”

“Don’t you have work to do?” he asks on a sigh, tipping his head to the side questioningly.

“No,” she replies soundly, though she’s already rising from her seat. “Anyone I know?”

“Donna,” he says, flicking his eyes to his desk and pulling the papers back to himself, lest she divine his eyes like tea leaves or entrails. She would know how to do that. She probably learned it from one of her library books. “Work.”

There’s a reason he hasn’t had this conversation aside from the obvious. Mostly, it’s that he knows she won’t let him live it down. No, she’s gonna hang onto this one, find ways to sneak a few over on him for it. Which he deserves, he’s not saying he doesn’t, he’s just saying is now really the time? A question of which he and Donna have two very distinct, very different answers.

“I just told you something very personal—”

“Which I didn’t ask you to do!” He laughs, both incredulous and amused, the way Donna has always left him.

From the door she casts a look over her shoulder, one steady hand on the doorknob, the other resting on the face of the door. “You’re no fun, you know that?”

He gives her that fake, sunny expression that he knows drives her crazy. “And you’re lucky I’m not, or Joey Lucas would still be hung up on me, and this conversation would never have happened. That guy’s one lucky bastard.”

She huffs a laugh and wrenches the door open, leaving with the same hurry as she’d entered.

He shakes his head ruefully, looking at where she’d just been with an odd turn to his mouth. Not sad, but particularly sobered. It twists the already wrought muscles between his shoulder blades, the same ache he’s had for months now.

Tugging uncomfortably at his tie, eyes trailing the room, that’s when he sees it—her file still on the floor by the chair. His sobriety morphs to amusement, knowing she’ll be back in no less than three minutes—but no more than five—to retrieve it in a flurry of reminders to try and distract him from her forgetting.

Well, at least some things never change.

JOSH’S PLACE

LATE THURSDAY EVENING

Josh is harried under the weight of his bag, hung over his shoulder with all the oppression of a gust of lukewarm air in the summer. He’s tired, but when is he not, weary, but again. Still, as he fiddles the key into the lock, he can feel some of the burden start to undo itself.

“’m home,” he calls, losing his shoes at the door—half-assedly lining them up with the other pair already there, too—and his bag with them. He finally undoes his tie like he’s been itching to all day and loops it on a hook by the door to be taken care of later. Or, more probable, in the morning when he drapes it back around his neck while a piece of toast hangs out of his mouth and he fumbles his fingers through retying it for another day.

“What happened with your meeting?” Sam asks from the couch. He’s already changed out of his suit, traded it for an old Duke sweatshirt that’s threadbare around the collar and sweatpants Josh are pretty sure are actually his, but can’t know entirely because they accidentally integrated their supplies a while ago. One socked foot on the floor and the other rested comfortably against the opposite knee, he has his laptop balanced on his lap, fingers moving expertly over the keys even as he speaks.

He still has his watch on, too, which is weird, and a little silly, but Josh smiles at that damn watch because it’s such a Sam thing to do; he knows he won’t take it off until he’s setting it on the nightstand on the side of the bed that neither of them will expressly say is his, but by the way it’s going sure as hell isn’t Josh’s anymore. But what’s semantics to a Deputy Communications Director?

“Oh, it was titillating,” he says wryly, swiftly waving his hand as he circles around the back of the couch. “I said my piece, they said theirs but curtly, so I said mine again a little louder, and no one budged on their belief—I mean, it’s comical the length of which the script writes itself, Sam.”

He stops and presses his hand to the crown of Sam’s head, leaving a kiss between his thumb and forefinger that’s now months in practice. Apparently not satisfied, Sam tilts his head back. Josh rolls a huff like a small laugh across the roof of his mouth and parks his hand on the side of Sam’s face—pinky warm against his still winter-cold hands—and kisses him upside down.

When he pulls back, Sam’s eyes are smiling.

“I’m gonna go change.”

“I’ll be done with this in, ah,” he hazards a look down. “Ten minutes?”

“Your calculations, not mine.” He kisses him again and heads off to the bedroom, thinking he’s content now to leave him with his clacking keys for another ten minutes.

As he starts pulling at the buttons on his shirt, though, his leg starts jiggling, and he can’t help but call, “Donna ambushed me in my office today to tell me she’s going on a date with Joey.”

He leans around the jamb to gauge Sam’s reaction, sees him cock his head to the side as the words process. A funny shape comes to his mouth and he looks over at Josh, knowing he’ll be there, to ask, “Joey? _Your_ Joey?” His fingers are still poised over the lead keys, thumb propped over the space bar. He looks like he’s going to laugh, the little lines by his mouth twitching expectantly.

“Not _my_ Joey,” Josh retorts, leaning back into the bedroom. He sheds the dress shirt, the undershirt, climbs into a t-shirt with little fanfare.

“You were fairly infatuated with her,” Sam reminds him, more humor in his voice than Josh would think there should be given, y’know, _the given_.

“So I’ve been told. But that doesn’t make her my Joey.”

“It’s a colloquialism.” Sam resumes tittering over his keys, but Josh can tell he’s still listening even without seeing him.

He trades dress pants for maybe-his, maybe-Sam’s sweatpants and debates socks. “And anyway,” he continues, systematically ignoring Sam’s remark so as not to give him the satisfaction, “I think she’s Donna’s Joey now.”

“Colloquially?” Sam asks, the side of his face that Josh can see when he finally retreats back to the living room a dogwood bloom. “Or is she going on the date? You know what, I’m assuming. You didn’t tell her not to, did you?”

Josh putters toward the kitchen, but as soon as his feet hit the cool tile he circles back for the socks he’d vetoed. “Of course I—why would I tell her anything different? And frankly, y’know, the fact that she even asked—” He holds his hands up in defeat as he crosses once more into the bedroom.

“I’m sure she values your friendship,” Sam says like he’s just thought of the solution to a particularly easy problem. “And it was nice of you to value hers too, given that you missed her birthday this year.”

Josh hops into his socks. “I miss her birthday every year!”

“I know, you should try harder on that; I mean, _I_ told her happy birthday and she’s not even my assistant. But for the record, I do make a point to tell all the Communications assistants happy birthday.”

“Thank you for that, I’ll make sure it’s reflected on your quarterly review.”

“Just doing what I can. Seven minutes now,” he adds blithely, keeping remarkable time.

“Ahead of schedule. Have you eaten yet?” Josh hasn’t and though hunger is nothing new, it’s still a low pain in his middle. He was deadlocked in his meeting from just after his late lunch until about an hour and a half ago, and they weren’t really the type to order-in.

“No, I had a late lunch.” Right, who in the greater metropolitan area hadn’t?

Josh fills a water glass at the sink, braces his hand on the counter as he downs it. “How late?” he asks, a bundle of water at the corner of his mouth that he wipes away with the back of his hand.

“Probably about five? It gets a little blurry after that given that I thought Toby was going to choke the life out of me and leave my prone body on the front steps of the Capitol building, so I just kept typing like a little monkey. I felt like that was best for both me and CJ.”

Josh laughs as he starts digging through the fridge, retracing their steps over the last week by dinner plates. There’s leftover Chinese, Greek too, some fries from that place around the corner, and Italian. The Italian is expired from what he can tell, and what he can tell is that they haven’t had Italian in a while.

“And here I thought self-preservation on government property was a federal crime.”

For a moment, there’s only the low din of mismatched plates being pulled from the cupboard and silverware scraping over old Styrofoam takeout boxes. There’s typing too, rickety and fine, but they both learned to tune that particular frequency out on the campaign trail. Or maybe before that, in heady law school libraries twined in ivy.

He hits the timer on the microwave for the first plate, setting it somewhere between Arctic Circle and nuclear meltdown, though which it’ll end up at is anyone’s guess. All there’s left to do is wait, so he props himself up in the corner of the counter by his elbows and folds forward to stretch out his back with a low groan. There are other stretches he should be doing, stretches passed down from doctors and that physical therapist that he’d only met with the once, but these odd affirmations are all he can ever remember to do.

“ETA?” he asks the back of Sam’s head only once he’s swapped one plate for the other.

“I just have this last paragraph.”

He picks a piece of beef out of his beef and broccoli and gives it a thoughtful chew. A little rubbery, but it’s still got flavor. Best damn thing he’s eaten all day.

Hearing the click of Sam’s laptop followed by the same of Sam’s glasses—the former goes to the coffee table and the latter he spies tucked at the collar of Sam’s sweatshirt when he comes around the corner scrubbing tiredly at his eyes—he lets himself be crowded in on with a quiet exhalation.

This here, this is the moment of release after a rigid day, second best only to waking up in the morning with sleep-stuck eyes and seeing one another across the mattress. Because after that, after rushed showers and quick breakfasts and one last kiss at the front door, it’s no hands, no glances, no out of the way smiles. Not until they’re home again, at least, and then it’s all hands, all unabashed glances, all peculiar smiles.

Be careful, he hears himself tell Donna. Screw that, he thinks fondly with Sam so close.

“Hey,” Sam murmurs, taking the side of Josh’s face in his hand while Josh works an arm around his middle and lets his other hand fall at Sam’s ribs. They kiss properly until the timer goes off behind them, then for a moment longer just because they can. It’s nice to be able to do something just because they can, without having to clear it through a train of people and jargon and schedules.

Josh pulls back only slightly and throws his thumb over his shoulder. “If that gets cold again, I’m not heating it back up,” he says with a slow-growing smile that dimples the corners of his mouth and a shake of his head that borders on charming.

Sam hums, sticking a thumb to one of them, and weighs the worth of his already aching wrists punching buttons on the microwave versus staying here. He knows what he’d pick, but he also knows that he hasn’t eaten since five and it may well be midnight, but it could very well be morning.

He presses forward and nudges a kiss through the fabric of Josh’s t-shirt to the top of his collarbone, nose bumping at his shoulder. Josh slots his hand over the back of Sam’s neck, skin there warm and furrowed, and lands a kiss in his hair, just over his ear.

They sit across from one another at the table because the couch is too far a trek at just two feet away. Their respective plates are pleasantly steaming on one side and stone cold on the other—which has nothing to do with how they spent their past few moments and all to do with some form of science that neither of them can grasp at the hour at hand. Their feet nudge under the table even if it’s juvenile and foolish. Josh keeps his tired, boyish look in the palm of his hand and the tongs of his fork, whereas Sam’s sits off to the corner of his mouth. It’s good, they each think, to be juvenile and foolish if you have someone to be it with.

“This is gonna come back to bite me on the ass, right?” Josh asks a little while later, seemingly picking up the middle of a conversation and running with it. Sam idly considers how long he’s been having it in his head.

“Donna and Joey?” he clarifies. He doesn’t have to, but he knows it’ll make Josh’s face get all consternated and he finds a certain kind of humor in that. He also knows that more than anything Josh is worried about Donna and will be until she tells him all’s well, which is sweet, but Sam’s still got to get his kicks somewhere.

As if on cue, Josh rubs over his forehead with his free hand and sighs. “Yeah.”

Sam tries to skewer some kind of bean on the end of his fork in a charming display of the lengths at which humanity has been removed from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, metal sounding against glass until he gets it, and he gives a perfunctory little nod, chin jerking down toward his messy United Nations plate. “Oh yeah,” before adding with an unsurprisingly amused grin, “But I like watching you try to figure out how. It’s good for you, keeps you on your toes.”

DONNA’S APARTMENT

SATURDAY NIGHT

The thing is, the _thing is,_ is that Donna has stress cleaned her apartment for half the time she’s been awake today. The thing _is_ , is that she started cleaning it and just kept finding things to clean, and now she’s looking at it and thinking it’s too clean. It looks like she lives in a catalogue. Not even one of the fun ones, like _Pottery Barn,_ but a _Sears_ catalogue or something equally depressing.

She should get some new drapes. No, she should _make_ some new drapes—she feels like she could have a good grasp of hand-dyeing if she had a five gallon bucket, a weekend, and the right amount of will.

At seven that morning her pager had gone off for two minutes straight until she called Josh from the phone in the kitchen and tried to put out the fire over the line in a whisper that wouldn’t wake her roommate who’d worked overnight. When that hadn’t worked—when Josh had asked her why she was talking him through the files on her desk like they were in a museum and she was the high-strung tour guide—she’d rushed into yesterday’s outfit and gone down there. Two hours later she was on her way back home. Apparently, crisis having been averted, she was no longer needed ‘for the day.’

There had been a certain amount of humor in the crook of Josh’s mouth when he’d told her that, eyes studiously hanging out over her shoulder, but she’d gotten what he meant and taken his rare sight of compassion for her thus far abysmal love life without complaint.

When she’d gotten home her mind was still in overdrive from the morning, but in the interest of being quiet until noon, she didn’t do much more than drink coffee, flip through the mail that had accumulated for her during the week, and set out her clothes for the night.

After her roommate finally got up and cleared out, though, once she didn’t have anything stopping her, she’d gone a little overboard. She could admit that, but it wasn’t _that_ far overboard. She just wanted things to be nice. There was never enough time to deep clean her hair, much less her apartment on her work schedule, so sue her if she took advantage of the opportunity with some zeal.

It started when she was vacuuming the carpet in the living room, and she’d had the thought that the walls looked a little dusty. So she’d lugged it around with attachments in hand and dispatched it all with righteous fury. Given that particular effort, she’d felt it would only be right that she scrubbed the grout in the kitchen, which took her down another rabbit hole that lead her down a few more by their white rabbit hands and, all in all, ended with her being a sweaty mess. Hair stuck to the back of her neck in curly Qs and shirt damp despite the chill outside that had started to seep in when she’d cracked the windows.

She and Joey hadn’t agreed on much more than time —which Donna knew as everyone in the greater D.C. area that even that was tentative—and place. Sure, it had been a hurried conversation, Kenny’s voice hushed in the corridor and she and Joey’s words encoded in ‘girl’s night’ hyperbole, but there was still the smile that Joey had given her that made it all seem worth it. All the jagged second-guessing and quiet contemplation.

The thing is, after all, that Donnatella Moss is whip-smart and great under pressure and she can always be counted on when the countdown clock is in its single digits. It's just that she’s just trying to remember how to trust in herself again.

Because actually the thing is that Donna doesn’t panic when the going gets tough. And if she, by some off chance, does, it doesn’t show because if you show it, it’ll break you and then it’ll break everyone around you, and you don’t want to be the person that breaks everyone around you.

And the reason Donna doesn’t panic is because sometimes she lets herself stress clean her apartment or eat ice cream right out of the pint or get all her energy out in some copious, private way before or after the fact.

It’s the little things in life, she’s learned. It’s the things you can control when everything else is out of your hands and steadily going to hell. It’s coming home after exhausting hours of not being able to do anything for anyone and bleaching the inside of the fridge. It's being so concerned about all the things that come attached the first date after a disastrous quasi-relationship that you vacuum the carpet until it looks two shades lighter.

She eyes the carpet in her bedroom now, nudges it with her thick, winter-white socks, and gives it an appreciative look. It’s viable enough, a physical enough change, to let the blood that’s rushed to her cheeks. She snaps the button on her jeans, folds down the neck on her gray-blue turtleneck, and lets the rest just wash away.

Trailing her way into the kitchen, she takes down the only two wine glasses in the apartment from the cabinet over the fridge and undoes the cork on the wine she’d picked up late the night before. She fills hers halfway—enough to look comfortable in her palm, to get the taste of it on her tongue, but not enough to fog over her eyes.

When the knock comes, she leaves it on the kitchen counter and pads through the living room, hair bouncing across the pale knit of her shoulders. She eddies the door open, little whirlpools of dazed anticipation hazy on the floor between them. Matching floral smiles turn towards the light of the other.

There on the threshold of her apartment like old friends they hug before they say hello. Donna leads Joey in with a hand that starts on her shoulder and slopes to the middle of her back once the door shuts, where it stays for a prolonged moment until one of them acts.

Joey undoes her scarf, red and purple and cream stripes with thick fringe at the end, and Donna takes it from her, as well as the belted overcoat she wears. She’s still in a pantsuit--a red silk blouse and cream-colored pants and matching shoes that Donna tells her to kick off at the door. Half for hospitality and half for the fact that it’s still tacky with lemon Pledge.

“I didn’t have time to change,” Joey says, signing slower for Donna’s benefit in the absence of Kenny.

“No, you look great, you look—” Donna exhales, catching stray words and tutting them to the back of her tongue to wait in line. They’ve got the whole night ahead of them. “Wine?”

Joey’s eyebrows do that thing where they raise with her lips and Donna thinks about kissing her. “Yes, please.”

There’s a certain kind of tension, Donna thinks as they take the seven or so steps to the kitchen, in first dates with someone you’ve met time and time again. There’s a certain kind of tension, of knowing and unknowing, she continues as she pours the wine, of a first date with a friend. Donna gets philosophical when the fruit of the wine fumes start to hit her like Persephone’s pomegranate seeds.

“Do you, I figured we could—” She shakes her head, rights herself. “Have you eaten?” she finally asks, reigning back in.

The thing is, by and large, that Donna hasn’t been on a real date, hasn’t been on a date with a friend much less, in a long time.

And though her mind keeps trying to connect this to her last disastrous run in with Karen Cahill, she tries to remind herself that this isn’t that. This is Joey looking at her without expectation, just something like endearment.

So, lack of play time? That’s never stopped Donna before.

“No,” Joey confirms, soft shake of her head, the pad of her fore- and middle finger tapping that of her thumb.

“Okay, good.”

They sit on the couch with their legs pulled underneath them and eat chocolate cake on paper plates with fine metal forks and another half-glass of wine a piece. They barely think of their discarded glasses when they’re picking chocolate icing from the tips of their thumbs and talking like they want—but never have the time—to anywhere that they have considerable face time.

“You got the chicken pox and fell out of a rowboat and that was the best summer you ever had?” Donna asks incredulously, her laugh round and whole and sticky like her fingers.

“Yes!” Joey reiterates emphatically, equal in her joy.

“I don’t believe you. I can’t believe you.” She leans forward, encircling her arms around her knees as her face takes on a sweet attentiveness.

Joey doesn’t say anything, but she tips her head to the side, hair shifting across the quiet slope of her neck and revealing the tiny diamond stud in her ear and a freckle just below it that makes Donna a little woozy with want.

“Can I—” Donna starts before she stops herself, her fingers twitching against the outside of her knee. Her eyes dart to the blinds, to the drapes—closed, she already knows, because she beat the dust out of them around 2 p.m.—but she refocuses herself by the spark in Joey’s eyes.

Be careful, Donna thinks to herself. Then, be careful, but don’t be a stick in the mud. Be careful, but don’t be a stick in the mud, but don’t act like you haven’t been thinking about kissing her since she walked in the door, but don’t make her think you haven’t been waiting for this all week. But don’t, but don’t, but don’t, she thinks, but don’t even try to act, Donnatella Moss, like you want anything else.

“Yes,” Joey says, her mouth dazzling. She’s wine-stained lips and rows of pretty teeth and she’s eyes that are looking at Donna’s mouth more intent than they have been all night. She’s a thrill and, as you'd have it, she’s tipping forward.

The thing is, coming back to it for a moment, is that Donna is cautious, and she is courteous, and she is the person you want to have on your team. She listens to direction and tweaks where she sees fit to make best the results and has known, in a manner of speaking, what she wants since she was fourteen years old.

She’s careful, but she can be trusted, and so can Joey Lucas she realizes with a kind of relief. So can Joey with her nylon stockinged feet nudging at the side of Donna’s thigh through her jeans. So can Joey, with her raised, waiting brows, and her mouth that Donna thinks will taste like wine and chocolate cake and even something more, like warmth and winter, too.

“Yes?” Donna repeats, just to make sure. It’s the last time she’ll let this jittery, out of character thread that’s been staking its claim in her ribs strike a chord tonight.

“Yes.”

She shifts forward onto her knees, her breath passing for a laugh when she sinks too far into the couch and has to steady herself on Joey’s warm calf. The touch is an electric fire, it’s a starting gun, it’s the key in the lock and the door swinging open. Her fingers touch Joey’s knee, skim the outside of her thigh and the slope of her arm to rest on the side of her neck. But two centimeters away from finally putting a bookend on knowing it was bound to happen and starting a new shelf of ‘it happened and then it happened again,’ she stops short.

She signs it quick—you’re beautiful—the words she’s been keeping at bay all night. Her other hand stays steady over Joey’s pulse point, nails nudged into the sweep of an auburn hairline.

And the thing is, actually, Joey does taste like wine and store-bought chocolate cake, and she does taste like warmth, and there on her teeth is winter when they brush Donna’s lower lip in a way that’s pretty damn compelling.

As she crooks herself over Joey—her knees dipping further into the cushion and her other hand reaching out for some kind of leverage, some kind of support—she thinks she’s lady luck. Is that what the heat in her chest is—luck—or is it something else entirely? Could it be her ribs cracking open and bleeding all the things she’s been throwing tape and coffee stirrers and meaningless legalese at for years in the hopes that it’ll stop this _ache?_

Because the thing is that when you work in the White House and you’re a woman who kisses women and the year is somewhere into the new millennia but only barely, you don’t have a lot of opportunity to try to stop the ache.

But that, that _day_ that Joey came into Josh’s office and showed him the business for what would be the first—though certainly not last—time and Donna had seen her out afterward, she’d made a joke, a hapless little thing, had told Joey, “I think you might be my new favorite person,” and maybe that had been what set them off, or maybe it hadn’t, but it was certainly what Donna was thinking about now.

Because as they stare at one another’s lips, she thinks that it could become a painfully honest notion if this goes past tonight. And something in her says it will, call it a hunch.

And so she laughs, borderline delirious and far-side free and without pain for the first time in a long, long time. Joey’s hand is on her throat, and she smiles, unrushed, up at Donna, before cupping around her neck and steering her back in.

The final thing—the last thing until night crawls into morning wherein Donna will smudge the sleep out of her eyes long enough to slip out of bed and make two cups of coffee—is that for once she can’t think of a single place she’d rather be.

THE OFFICE

MONDAY, BRIGHT AND EARLY

When Donna gets to work on Monday morning, no one meets her at the door. She sifts through a few messages and jogs her own memory on the things that need to get done: itinerary, calls to make or return or dodge, new pot of coffee because the first one is already over and done with.

When Josh gets into work on Monday morning, she meets him at the door. She starts rattling off messages and reminders and he said, she said with the same refreshing accuracy as always while he pours second-pot coffee into his cup.

In the time between there’s no mentions made of dates or dinner or Joey Lucas, no how was your weekend or upheaval of what has already been laid to rest—for the time being—about Josh’s love life. Work is work and business is business as usual, right down to Donna folding herself into Josh’s office with lunch at a time decent only to them and maybe, probably, someone somewhere across the globe.

“Josh,” she says, calling his attention away from the pen cap he has shoved in the corner of his mouth and the notes he’s scrabbling in the margins of the stack of papers in his lap. “Your meeting with the Senator’s been pushed back to four thirty.”

She nudges the door shut with the back of her heel while he peels himself out of his chair and pushes his rolled sleeves back up. They fall exactly as they had before he’d touched them, but it’s all he’s got.

He arcs around her, still tugging at his sleeves even as he shuttles his mainstay contribution to their irregular lunch meetings out of the fridge. Before she sits down she pushes his container into his hands and he passes off a bottled water.

Donna undoes the thick plastic lid on her plate and turns it clockwise until whatever vegetable she ordered is facing the desk and the chicken is directly beneath her. She’d wanted a little more than salad. Hell, she’d earned a little more than salad. She also might still be riding the high of her weekend, but that’s neither here nor there.

“And the, the uh.” He thumbs the tab on his plate and tosses the condensation-slick lid on the desk before he rubs over his bunched eye with the hand not holding lunch. “The thing? With the,” he sighs, twiddling his fork in the air. “The jackass committee.”

She nods, preemptively holding her plate forward two seconds before he spoons the onions off his onto hers, eyeing her under his brows like she doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing. They never remember to leave off the onions and he never seems to think about taking them out for another spin. It’s a good thing, then, that Donna is an extra onions kind of woman.

“Toby and Sam are still in with them.” She doesn’t bother to correct him. They are a jackass committee.

“All right.”

They eat in quick silence for half a plate before he looks up with a sharp inhale and says, “Y’know, I’ve been thinking about it, I mean, I’ve thought about it.”

Donna smiles into her lunch, stabbing a hunk of roasted potato with her to-go plate fork.

“Did you know that because the hat pin was such a popular form of self-defense for women, they passed these ordinances requiring that the ends be covered? But the poor women, the poor women couldn’t afford the covers, so they’d use these, I don’t know, sundry items. All kinds of things, like cork or potato scraps—just like this, they’d just stick it right there on the end, Josh.”

She holds her fork up to demonstrate and only pries it off with her teeth once she’s seen the spark—what is that, she wonders, concern?—in his eyes.

“You didn’t see her?” Josh asks, all puppy-dog confused and not at all relieved. Which is good to know, nice to have confirmation that he wasn’t bullshitting her last week.

“What? Oh, no, I saw her. It was a great night, Josh, I mean really great—” her smile takes hold and becomes larger, more sure-footed. “Cake and rowboats.”

“I’m gonna act like I know what that means, but I don’t and before you start, I really don’t want to. You gonna see her again?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

He nods, and she can tell that he’s trying not to give her the satisfaction of a smile. Never let it be said that Josh Lyman cares about the intricacies of the personal life of his assistant. Never let it be said, but if it’s thought, well, that’s another story. “Good.”

“There’s two days in the weekend, Josh,” she adds in a conspiratorial whisper.

“Yeah, thank you, I know that much.”

“‘ _And on the second day, she read.’”_

“Don’t think that’s how that one goes. But, y’know, there was just—I mean, just one thing I wanted to ask you about. After the State of the Union...” he trails, waiting for her to pick up the thread.

“I was investigating.”

“See, 'cause Joey seemed to be under the impression you were trying to break yourself gently of some insurmountable infatuation you’d cultivated for me.”

“Josh, I’ve cultivated a lot of feelings for you—mostly blind hatred,” she states, flush, dry tone finally bringing a full smile to his face. “But it was quick cover. She didn’t know that you knew about me. And what does it matter, anyway? You do know about me, and even if you didn’t, you’re apparently,” she reminds helpfully, “seeing someone.”

It’s impressive, the skill with which she’s swung them back around to this. It has to be a new record.

He puts his plate down, three-quarters finished, and leans his elbows on his desk, hands clasped in front of him. “Yeah,” he says, admitting a half-time defeat. “I am.”

She squints. “Are you happy?” she asks thoughtfully.

He shakes his head in flagrant endeared amusement, pushing away the thought that he should be the one to ask her that now. “Yeah, what the hell,” he says, leaning back into his chair. “Yeah, Donna, I am. I’m the happiest I’ve been in a long time. So will you stop doing that?”

“What?”

“Making me talk to you like we’re friends.”

“I can’t help it, it’s one of my many charms.”

“Wish you’d put that on your résumé, would’ve made me think twice.”

“You would’ve actually had to have read my résumé, y’know.”

“Do you hear a phone ringing? I think I hear a phone ringing. Why don’t you go pick that up?”

She snaps the lid back on her plate and pushes to her feet. “See, the thing is,” she says in her best ‘aw shucks’ voice, “I don’t think that was on my résumé.”

“But the charm was?”

“Oh, the charm definitely was, my friend.”

**Author's Note:**

> the next part should be up sometime soon if i can ever stop editing it lmao it'll be a near direct follow up to this one in which donna finally gets her answers vis a vis josh's love life
> 
> also im on tumblr @foxmulldr :^)


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